The purpose of the investigation of life events is to measure the relationship between the number and kind of life events - the amount of subjectively felt social support and social alienation to mood disorders in affectively disturbed patients versus their normal relatives who are used as controls. A new scale, the Family Attitudes Questionnaire (FAQ), was developed to measure patients' and relatives' perceptions of the morbid risk for depression or mania or schizophrenia, of the burden these disorders create for the family, and the effect this may have on future plans of a family member for marriage or childbearing. In Bipolar illness, 19 married patient/spouse couples, where marriages had been stable for at least two years, responded to the FAQ. Fifty-three percent of the spouses said they would not have married knowing of the disorder but none of the patients did. Fifty-eight percent of the spouses said they would not have had children knowing of the possible risk of transmission. In schizophrenia, patients rated burded and risk lower than their parents, but well sibs gave lowest risk/burden estimates.